Rare Basquiat Drawings Go On View in Denmark
A new exhibition at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art features dozens of works on paper that were discovered two years after the legendary artist's death
A visit to the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art just outside of Copenhagen in Denmark is never less than delightful. Situated on the water’s edge of the silvery strait that separates Denmark and Sweden, and in a park filled with sculptures by artists from Alexander Calder to Alicja Kwade, it is a place of total, but accessible, devotion to art. (Filled with chic Danish artifacts begging to be taken home, the museum shop and its restaurant is also worth a stop.)
Within this calm context, a new exhibition dedicated to Jean-Michel Basquiat’s works on paper erupts like a powerful explosion. “It’s like someone threw a grenade,” says its curator, Anders Kold, as we enter the first gallery, where 12 startling oil-stick renderings of heads reverberate on the walls. “There’s an incredible energy that flows right from the work into these conversations about Basquiat that we’re still having today.”
Basquiat died at the age of 27 in 1988, but left a considerable body of work behind. His paintings now fetch millions, and there is just one hanging here: the black skull on a vivid turquoise background that made news when it was acquired by Yusaku Maezawa in 2017 for $110.5 million. It is now owned by Ken Griffin, who, according to Kold, has been “extremely helpful” in the organization of this show. But the focus here is on 49 of a sizable cache of works on paper discovered two years after the artist’s death.
Indeed, most of these works have also come from private collections, with numerous not having been seen in public for decades. They hang here in a variety of frames, from fancy to minimal, suggesting the myriad domestic settings in which they normally live. In each one, a head sits at the center of the page, some skull-like, some humanoid, some more fleshily real. “They are not people, they are not portraits,” explains Kold. “They live in an interpretational zone, where the head is a container, a threshold between the inner world and the realities of the outer one.” They are psychological musings, cries, emotions, and observations in paper and oilstick, both lightly comic and deeply dark. The exhibition is called “Headstrong” for a reason.
It’s not known exactly why Basquiat made these numerous drawings, which are mostly dated between 1981 and 1984. They seem to have been created with some urgency, the oilstick thickly impacted into the paper, the odd trainer mark suggesting they were made on the studio floor. Their energy is undimmed 40 years later—the work of an artist who had so much to say and never enough time to say it.
Most definitely finished works, these are not messy sketches or provisional thoughts or ideas to feed into larger paintings. “I keep work in the studio because it’s closer to process, but that’s not the case with these drawings,” says artist Dana Schutz in Called Drawings Between Life and Death, which also includes musings from Arthur Jafa and Alvaro Barrington. Whether Basquiat intended them for show is simply unknown.
What they do amplify, though, is his incredible skill as a draftsman. Like Paul Klee and Picasso, Basquiat can make a line perform with absolute clarity. He had the ability to produce work that looks casual and spontaneous, though it has reached a state of perfection. Whether it’s a bugged-eye face with gridded teeth or a black-and-yellow head with curving lines steaming upwards like wayward uncontainable thoughts, each work is a complete package in which intense physicality meets something more elusive, or metaphysical, still replete with the recognizable motifs: crowns, letters, numbers, grids. And each is remarkably different—all 49 of them—though all pulling you in with their staring eyes and gaping mouths.
What Kold has done most particularly in the exhibition is allow Basquiat to sit alone. “There’s no mention of Madonna or Warhol or Debbie Harry,” says Kold of the bold-faced names who tend to crop up next to the artist’s. “Museums must defend the actual artworks against the mythology and the reputation of an artist. It’s something institutions should do.” The only glimpse of Basquiat’s social or personal life is a spiky full-length drawing of him and Suzanne Mallouk, a bona fide girlfriend who eventually exited the New York club world to train as a psychiatrist.
Nonetheless, you can’t extract him from the moment in time which he so strongly represents—the New York of the early 1980s, when the worlds of fashion, art, music, and clubbing collided to a newly minted hip-hop soundtrack. In one of the several wonderful essays in the accompanying catalogue, the critic Hilton Als describes Basquiat as “this 19-year-old kid from a middle-class background who looked like a Bowery Bum and a fashion model at the same time.” But he also goes on to describe the New York art world as “incredibly segregated and racist.” If Basquiat was perhaps the first Black artist to break through, he wasn’t as widely accepted as we might now think. When Robert Miller first showed these drawings in his New York gallery in 1990, just after their discovery, it was a commercial success, but there was no institutional interest whatsoever. How times have changed.
“Headstrong” is on view at Louisiana Museum of Modern Art through May 17, 2026